Meta Format

[Dan Rosenstein]

Is there a document that states best practice for typing meta? This would include when to use commas, underscores for phrases, etc. Basically, how to do meta for a knowledge article out of the box best practices. 

[OwenB]

Great discussion indeed :-)...

I think with searches with that many specific words Zing is clever enough to put those two top based on the scoring as those words are mentioned in the searchable fields and are fairly specific to that content.  It's probably a lottery to which one it puts first and when you use the tags its going to almost exact search that and put the underscore one top although if those words are mentioned in that order tones of times in another articles it would have put that on top.

If you have a sparsely populated KB with little articles with Meta tags then 100% comma separating tags with no underscores will be more than enough. 

The real benefit comes when you have tens of thousands of articles that are more similar and you may have used the comma separated tag elsewhere.  Then you can phrase tag 2 or 3 words together with underscores that have been mentioned 100's of times in other articles.

Guess it would also depend on weightings you have set etc. 

[Henrietta T]

How is Relevancy calculated? Do you find having it appear is of any benefit?

[Barry_W]

I believes scores are calculated as per the following article:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/paris-platform-administration/page/administer/search-administrati...

I don't have relevancy scores available to end users currently as I'm not sure how much value it adds. 

I do however use it as a training aid, when showing staff how properly constructed titles, and good use of the meta field, can improve the relevancy of an article and in theory, improve the chances of a customer locating it. For example - as per this thread - including a commonly used search phrase in the meta field, then illustrating how this is reflected in the relevancy score if customers were to use it.

[Henrietta T]

So are we concluding that use of _ and " " doesn't have any impact to search?

[OwenB]

In my mind and out instance they do the same thing... The Underscores for the Meta and the "'s in the search.  We find using the underscores as above negates the need for the searcher to use ".